This is worrying as it seems that we in Britain are increasingly fucking up on what appear to be perfectly decent and safe tablets from NL if used properly..
Even if they did have “teddy” bears on them as a marking such bears are not just American but a traditional European kids toy and were originally made to look a lot more realistic and scary; and many Europeans know instinctively to treat bears with respect (as there are still a fair few in EU nations!) – to North and East Europeans a bear is a symbol of strength and power…
That said I really don’t think 12 year old lasses in modern England really are going to simply swallow random pills handed out to them because the markings are cute or mistake them for sweets (if anything they would be more paranoid about sweets for fear of “getting fat”) and when I was last partying a few years ago the increasingly young age of drug users was starting to unnerve me; I would regularly encounter youths of 15-17 of both genders who genuinely had started taking the “harder” party drugs as young as 12/13 and most said that smoking and alcohol use was rife by the final years of junior school in comparision to my generation who started around 14/15.
This (and a lot of the recent fatal ODs across England) come across as the sort of accident that easily occurs when you’ve got social groups spanning two generations with parents of my age who might be understandably more liberal minded but perhaps don’t have the knowledge/parenting skills to teach harm reduction to the younger generations (who are likely to ignore a lot of it anyway) and limit their supplies
I started with tobacco and cannabis around age 15, was able to get (albeit limited) supplies of pharm grade amfetamines by age 16 and although it clearly hasn’t caused me any known permanent harm I personally think its a bit young to start on these and in the 1980s high cost and limited availability also reduced harm as you couldn’t do them too often even if you wanted to….
A lesser (but not insignificant) disadvantage of starting heavy use too early is you burn out quicker as well; all those teen/20 something ravers I knew 9/10 years ago burned out by their mid 20s whereas there are some of my generation who kept partying to their early 40s (and some who occasionally still do it)…
Few things I’d like to know are never mentioned in these articles and which are important. What didn those tablets actually contain for a start. They don’t even bother with urine testing people they suspect/accuse of taking drugs and if they have samples they can test, rarely do. Where did they get them and did they know what they were? what is the 3rd girl in hospital for? I’m assuming nothing tbh other than she was involved with the other 2 and then makes me wonder why 2 would be seriously affected but a 3rd wouldn’t be as would be expected.
In the scheme of things some of them may be details if they took pills branded with teddy bears that turn out to be dangerous as that sort of information needs to be put to people that might come into contact with them. Too often though any random shite is made up by police and peddled to the unquestioning and gleefully naive press with not a shred of evidence.
GL: People here seem to be starting younger and getting to the hard stuff quicker in America as well & the perception of what is a hard drug has changed, about a decade ago if it was Schedule 1 or 2 it was a hard drug, now it is more about how dangerous it is for it to be a hard drug, which is a weird switch in thinking; instead of being cognizant of how the police treat it people are cognizant of how their peers view it. Additionally the burnouts in America come from all ranges from 25-50+ it seems although starting age is a good pre-indicator of end result of the person. It’s funny to go to a rave and see someone about 50 or so rolling for their 500th time or something, like dude that ship sailed. I had a 60 year old lady tell me she’d tried molly for the first time and thought it was shit, I had to tell her that it was probably bath salts.
Trypt: It might be early in the game to know what they took, or privacy or the reporter not following up with the hospital ect ect, although I’d think even at 12 or 13 you should be okay taking MDMA or MDA or other substituted Amphetamines with little risk as long as the dosage wasn’t absurd and basic common sense regarding hydration and hyperthermia was employed. I really want to know WTF they took & how much.
@tryptameanie 984929 wrote:
Few things I’d like to know are never mentioned in these articles and which are important. What didn those tablets actually contain for a start. They don’t even bother with urine testing people they suspect/accuse of taking drugs and if they have samples they can test, rarely do.
Unfortunately the current political/legal system cause this vicious circle – the NHS staffs priority is on helping the casualties recover (depending how ill they are it is quite likely anything going in or out of them will be monitored with a lot of sophisticated equipment) but with illegal drugs under the current UK its left to the Police to lead the investigation of what they might be or how the casualties came to ingest them. Its possible that any remaining supplies of the pills were discarded by the girls out of fear although latest reports state GMP have arrested two adults in connection with the case.
The reports state the third girl was well enough to have made her way to a local shopping centre but her behaviour attracted the attention of the Police; who then discovered the other two and took all 3 to the hospital.
Bear in mind also as they are all below age 18 the full EU privacy laws kick in so even the Police and NHS press statements have to be deliberately vague to avoid the girls or their families being identified and targeted by all sorts of bad actors, not just gutter press reporters but wannabe anti-drug activists which are a problem especially in some bits of NW England.
Some independent monitoring I carried out of what is actually being accepted by WEDINOS post ban outside Wales leads me to believe that the English Police and Police Scotland are getting the drugs tested there but they are doing it in an unusual and borderline devious way.
I used to work for Royal Mail and noticed in the accepted results a pattern of recurring English and Scottish postcodes that matched unusual areas that weren’t the centre of cities or towns (where cops might discover them as part of night time economy patrols) nor were they the suburbs where you’d expect users voluntarily submitting their purchases to have come from.
I was able to match up at least half of them to Police stations in England and Scotland; but not the traditional city/town centre ones. In recent times there is a trend for the Police to close down these big stations and take people they have arrested to special “processing centres” some kilometres away from the main town/city; where they are interviewed and for minor drugs offences they are usually only cautioned and sent home minus the drugs. These new Police Stations tend in a different and often unusual postcode area to anywhere else in the region!
It is actually illegal to post controlled drugs via Royal Mail but cops/govt have other secure despatch services they can use (the same ones for the labs in London or elsewhere they use) although they’d still use the postcode on the submission form as the geographic locator. It appears that the substances are being sent to WEDINOS in small regular batches rather than in an ad hoc fashion following any particular incident. Although the Heddlu and Welsh NHS/GIG/ Councils tend to disclose if their submissions are “official” there is no requirement for them to do this.
IMO the way its done in UK compared to NL or anywhere else helps nobody (not even the cops) and for adult victims merely exposes the families to the full glare of anyone who might want to search through their social network postings without helping the harm reduction aspect one bit.
When everything you’ve been told about drugs turns out to be made up at best it’s good that peoples perceptions change based on what the actual facts are.
You’re right bud, it’s too early for anything definitive to be said about the pill they took but a urine test takes seconds and you’d think if you’re going to tell reporters 3 kids have taken teddy bear branded MDMA, they’d care about whether they actually had MDMA in their systems. If those pills turn out to be say PMA/PMMA or something even worse, how do they then announce that without lloking like total clowns?
Too many times the media brands people as dying from taking some compound and yet gthey have no evidence at all to support the claims. 2 kids reported dead ater taking mephedrone, had taken no drugs, recently a teenager became the 1st person in history to die grom using nitrous oxide, but he had just been somewhere that may have had nitrous in it and there was no evidence he’d even used nitrous. And lets not forget the imaginary man who ore his scrotum off after using mephedrone.
@General Lighting 984932 wrote:
Unfortunately the current political/legal system cause this vicious circle – the NHS staffs priority is on helping the casualties recover (depending how ill they are it is quite likely anything going in or out of them will be monitored with a lot of sophisticated equipment) but with illegal drugs under the current UK its left to the Police to lead the investigation of what they might be or how the casualties came to ingest them. Its possible that any remaining supplies of the pills were discarded by the girls out of fear although latest reports state GMP have arrested two adults in connection with the case.
I can understand that GL but if a child, or anyone, had some issue that was serious enough to land them in hospital, samples of blood, urine and “solids” would be taken and tested for something to confirm the diagnosis. To not even do a quick test on urine is shockingly bad. On top of that, if the police don’t have anything at all as far as what they took and its legal status, what can they even begin to investigate?
Also, deliberately vague is exactly what they do, apart from when they name a compound, then it is passed off as total fact. They could at least say suspected MDMA.
@tryptameanie 984934 wrote:
I can understand that GL but if a child, or anyone, had some issue that was serious enough to land them in hospital, samples of blood, urine and “solids” would be taken and tested for something to confirm the diagnosis. To not even do a quick test on urine is shockingly bad. On top of that, if the police don’t have anything at all as far as what they took and its legal status, what can they even begin to investigate?
28 years ago I ended up in the ED myself due to a deliberate overdose attempt (although involving legal substances) NHS certainly do take samples of anything they can get – although the first thing they try to do is understandably flush out the suspected poisons and reduce the stress on the internal organs.
Samples of urine and solids are also often not immediately forthcoming for a variety of reasons (such as the internal organs shutting down or the patient being unconscious!). I remember being in there a whole week, having at least two drips in my arm, multiple blood tests passing out on several occasions and waking up to see my parents, psychiatrists and two Social Services present in front of me (there was a big chart at the bottom of my bed which was constantly being updated with various medical data).
Obviously what the NHS did worked as I’m still here but it was apparently borderline at one point as I’d consumed way over the safe amounts of various 1980s era pharms that happened to be in my house and totally unballanced the levels of chemicals in my blood that the kidneys/liver process. For ethical reasons (as this site attracts troubled young people) I won’t say what they were (I can’t even remember half of them myself) and I’d even gone to the trouble of destroying the containers they were in having consumed the contents.
when I was first taken in a 1980s style punched card was placed on my chest, as these even then were classed as obsolete for years I had wondered “WTF was that used for?” – its only a few years ago I realised it would have been for notifying National Statistics and the UN if I hadn’t made it as deaths below age 18 are monitored worldwide.
Although the young girls today are hopefully being looked after using more up to date equipment; the NHS are likely to be just as much “working in blindfold” as they were with me 28 years ago. The legality of or otherwise of the substances and the social stigma complicates things; plus in recent times we’ve grown up with an expectation the media will delve much deeper into peoples private issues.
if I hadn’t made it my case would likely only have been reported in the local paper or might have even stayed out as my parents, school and the parish priests were well respected enough to get more “sympathetic reporting” (especially as my younger sister would still have to grow up in the same area).
Everyone involved (NHS, my parents and other relatives, social services, my school, the church) all tried their very best to help me through what turned out to be a very hard time in my life and to be fair as a collective effort it didn’t turn out too badly; but by the early 90s I was already a regular party drugs user, I managed not to OD accidentally and party drugs actually discouraged me from any further attempts at self-harm as I had something to live for.
But even in the early 90s people I know took PMMA pills and had fatal reactions but HM Coroner recorded the deaths as the medical conditions rather than directly from the drugs so the family couldn’t be identified.
The attitudes may have changed a bit today but at one point the public services being “vague” was seen as a form of kindness even if it only helped one family.
Of course what should be investigated is why young people choose to self harm or if they do take recreational drugs how to reduce this harm but Britain is still 25 years behind everywhere else – I was reading Trimbos NL’s Dutch website today and there was loads of stuff aimed at people my age who are parents about how you should discuss the issues about growing up with your kids.
@Shakyamuni 984931 wrote:
Trypt: It might be early in the game to know what they took, or privacy or the reporter not following up with the hospital ect ect, although I’d think even at 12 or 13 you should be okay taking MDMA or MDA or other substituted Amphetamines with little risk as long as the dosage wasn’t absurd and basic common sense regarding hydration and hyperthermia was employed. I really want to know WTF they took & how much.
latest statement from the cops is that all 3 girls are in a stable condition and that its now suspected they took the substance after it was mixed into a bottle of soft drink (and two adults from the same area have been arrested) – it is unclear whether these adults knowingly encouraged the young girls to consume the substance or they decided themselves to try and dilute it in this manner.
hopefully they will all make a full recovery as this doesn’t sound like a very large overdose and have in reality only had a scare. A lot of the vagueness (including the non disclosure of what connection the adults have with these kids) is due to privacy laws as for the fatal ODs in the same region where the victims have been over age 17 the full details of the casualty and family (including enough info to trace them to their doorsteps) have all been published.
@General Lighting 984937 wrote:
28 years ago I ended up in the ED myself due to a deliberate overdose attempt (although involving legal substances) NHS certainly do take samples of anything they can get – although the first thing they try to do is understandably flush out the suspected poisons and reduce the stress on the internal organs.
Samples of urine and solids are also often not immediately forthcoming for a variety of reasons (such as the internal organs shutting down or the patient being unconscious!). I remember being in there a whole week, having at least two drips in my arm, multiple blood tests passing out on several occasions and waking up to see my parents, psychiatrists and two Social Services present in front of me (there was a big chart at the bottom of my bed which was constantly being updated with various medical data).
Obviously what the NHS did worked as I’m still here but it was apparently borderline at one point as I’d consumed way over the safe amounts of various 1980s era pharms that happened to be in my house and totally unballanced the levels of chemicals in my blood that the kidneys/liver process. For ethical reasons (as this site attracts troubled young people) I won’t say what they were (I can’t even remember half of them myself) and I’d even gone to the trouble of destroying the containers they were in having consumed the contents.
when I was first taken in a 1980s style punched card was placed on my chest, as these even then were classed as obsolete for years I had wondered “WTF was that used for?” – its only a few years ago I realised it would have been for notifying National Statistics and the UN if I hadn’t made it as deaths below age 18 are monitored worldwide.
Although the young girls today are hopefully being looked after using more up to date equipment; the NHS are likely to be just as much “working in blindfold” as they were with me 28 years ago. The legality of or otherwise of the substances and the social stigma complicates things; plus in recent times we’ve grown up with an expectation the media will delve much deeper into peoples private issues.
if I hadn’t made it my case would likely only have been reported in the local paper or might have even stayed out as my parents, school and the parish priests were well respected enough to get more “sympathetic reporting” (especially as my younger sister would still have to grow up in the same area).
Everyone involved (NHS, my parents and other relatives, social services, my school, the church) all tried their very best to help me through what turned out to be a very hard time in my life and to be fair as a collective effort it didn’t turn out too badly; but by the early 90s I was already a regular party drugs user, I managed not to OD accidentally and party drugs actually discouraged me from any further attempts at self-harm as I had something to live for.
But even in the early 90s people I know took PMMA pills and had fatal reactions but HM Coroner recorded the deaths as the medical conditions rather than directly from the drugs so the family couldn’t be identified.
The attitudes may have changed a bit today but at one point the public services being “vague” was seen as a form of kindness even if it only helped one family.
Of course what should be investigated is why young people choose to self harm or if they do take recreational drugs how to reduce this harm but Britain is still 25 years behind everywhere else – I was reading Trimbos NL’s Dutch website today and there was loads of stuff aimed at people my age who are parents about how you should discuss the issues about growing up with your kids.
I ahev been through similar things once or twice my friend. Legal compounds which they knew to be what I’d taken. Bllod is always taken, urine not so much and stool sampleson even fewer occaisions.
NONE are checked for drugs but we are describing a different situation here. 1 girl was fine, she could have been tested to confirm what it was making the other 2 unwell. They had a person they could get a sample from no problem, yet they didn’t, even thpugh those results could have confirmed or otherwise what was cousing the other 2 to be unwell.
I egt what you’re saying GL but I don’t think it in any way helps anyone other than label (possibly wrongly) as drug users.
Threy would never in a million years tell the world someone has cancer without bothering to do any tests, why shoukd they be allowed to do this?
@General Lighting 984938 wrote:
latest statement from the cops is that all 3 girls are in a stable condition and that its now suspected they took the substance after it was mixed into a bottle of soft drink (and two adults from the same area have been arrested) – it is unclear whether these adults knowingly encouraged the young girls to consume the substance or they decided themselves to try and dilute it in this manner.
hopefully they will all make a full recovery as this doesn’t sound like a very large overdose and have in reality only had a scare. A lot of the vagueness (including the non disclosure of what connection the adults have with these kids) is due to privacy laws as for the fatal ODs in the same region where the victims have been over age 17 the full details of the casualty and family (including enough info to trace them to their doorsteps) have all been published.
If they were mixed into a drink that suggests they were spiked and if that’s the cas, how do they know they had teddy bears on them?
So many holes in this story.
@tryptameanie 984957 wrote:
Threy would never in a million years tell the world someone has cancer without bothering to do any tests, why shoukd they be allowed to do this?
They are “allowed” to do this because English voters do not want change because they feel that “their tax money is spent on helping addicts”.
People (especially those who do not have kids) often even begrudge paying taxes for schools or anything “extra” like youth and community service but always seem happy to pay for more Police stations and surveillance (unless the cops are busting them for bad driving).
This (and similar incidents in NW England) just show how bad it has got with drugs treatment in England being left to the criminal justice system and trial by media/social networks rather than overseen by health authorities which is what now happens everywhere else in Europe (including CH and NO that aren’t even in the EU).
In my area (classed as more affluent than NW England, as is SE England and the North East) hard drugs users (cocaine/heroin etc) have already been written off by everyone other than the harm reduction agencies backed up by faith groups/Church of England and even they have a hard time of it these days getting funding.
I know a few of their support workers (not because of my own use but from their wider activities with local environment groups) and even seriously considered helping a local Christian charity writing info handouts about NPS although they did to be fair manage to update these with more accurate info; only for their service to have its funding slashed and the contract handed over to a more “abstinence-based” service run from somewhere in London with completely insufficient staffing levels and all the harm reduction info removed elsewhere.
The saddest part of this is it really does seems that NW England is being used (probably for political reasons) even more than in 1980s as a dumping ground for all the countries social problems under a facade of being “youth friendly and hip” – those who get ill as well as the underfunded health service and even the Police are simply being used as “useful idiots” to help right-wing prohibitionists advance their agendas.
These sorts don’t even care if/when their own middle class kids are harmed by their level of stupidty and stubborness – they just bury them with the hope “Jesus will save them in the next life” (when He would in fact have preferred them to be helped in the first one!) and then “get on with their lives/business as usual”.
Although the rest of Europe isn’t perfect and Britain still has some things going for it there has for 30 years been a complete lack in basic structures of communities, families etc.
One advantage of being reasonably proficient in Dutch, French and German but not 100% fluent is I have to read everything like I am a teenager once again so tend to read the youth websites/media and their harm reduction info as if I was myself a local kid in high school/sixth form and not the top of the class either (which is exactly where much of it is aimed at).
Athough overt organised religion isn’t stressed like it once was and plays much less of a rôle in younger peoples lives there is a genuine spiritual background to this harm reduction, young people are encouraged to take a more holistic view of how their actual or planned substance use might affect them or others and kids who make mistakes are viewed as “redeemable sinners” rather than just written off.
@Shakyamuni 984961 wrote:
So many holes in this story.
Using the Police in this busy urban area of England to single handedly oversee media liaison for an incident of this nature (even if the officers have had some training on both drugs and media awareness) is like training a large dog to ride a childs bicycle – it is possible (a middle aged Japanese couple did exactly that) – and might even work short term as a “circus act” but hardly the most effective or efficient way of going about things. (The dog did go on to become a film and TV star though unsurprisingly got “typecast” in pet food adverts) :laugh_at:
During the “acid house/ Madchester” era around 1988-1990 there used to be loads of harm reduction agencies based around NW England; I was a youth worker for a time around then and we even got their leaflets and posters 200km down South in an affluent bit of SE England.
its a shame that most of these seem to have been sidelined (although the largest one appears to have been part taken over by NHS (mostly to put them under regulators control) and then downsized into a “private service provider”) unfortunately not surprising as their “liberal” views came in for a lot of criticism and some of their workers even got trouble from GMP and other constabularies for “facilitating drugs use” especially if they ran rehabs that werent “100% clean”.
But for all the moral panics their leaflets explicitly warned under 18s against starting with hard drugs too early and instructed young parents to take care with locking up stuff safely. Unfortunately no copies exist even on the modern successors of these agencies (TBH every UK harm reduction agency website since 2010 seems to be full of official documents to keep the main govt happy and nothing aimed directly to “service users”) which is an even greater shame as the content would be just as valid today as it was a few decades back.
latest reports claim the pills were bear-shaped, the 12 year old girls appear to have been given them for free by two young adults (arrested and bailed) of age 21 and 22. Thankfully the worst affected of the 3 girls has now recovered to the point they have been transferred from ICU ward at Alder Heys childrens hospital Liverpool to a normal observation ward; the other who was bluelighted is recovering and will soon be well enough to give a statement to detectives.
This really does look like an accident caused by the young adults being reckless and the girls perhaps trying (as pre teens do) to act “grown up and reballious” leading to a dangerous situation – although the relatives claim the girls mistook the pills for harmless sweets, MDMA and amfetamine type stimulants taste particularly awful and the production of sweets that look like pills (or vice versa) has been discouraged throughout Europe for 40 odd years…
Following some further research in Dutch I’m more inclined to believe at least one of the girls perhaps had some idea what they might be but underestimated the strength of what they could be taking. I found this on a Dutch site (a post from some years ago) discussing various pills
Vergeet de PAARSE PANDABEER niet. 226-238 mg / Die zijn hard!
(Don’t forget the purple pandabear pills, content 226-238 mg / These are strong!)
The pills were described as “pink” in the news article below.
If anyone is wondering why there aren’t Dutch kids similarly keeling over (in some regions they are no more well behaved than English ones; currently a group of pre-teens are wanted by the police for terrorising a whole shopping centre) its because their drugs education does seem to encourage them to wait until they are a bit older and even normal users (not dealers) have the self control to hoard hundreds of pills for their own use and only take them one at a time.
The only unusual thing is that this area is completely the other side of the coast from NL; if it was the coastal routes you’d expect all this stuff to be flooding both the regions where myself and Tryptameanie live first!
I think that as well as way more suitable music events (MDMA isn’t much fun to do alone sat in front of a computer) there are a lot of Universities in NW England which attract European students particularly of “liberal arts” ; I wonder if these students are trading or even giving away quantities of pills as a genuine gesture of friendship to local young people, maybe to defuse the tensions and paranoia over “foreigners”; and a toxic combination of language barriers and lack of education is leading to these unfortunate incidents?
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